26. CIA Drug Smuggling in Arkansas:
Mena Connection Exposing the CIA, Bush, Clinton Iran-Contra
(Full Length) - HERE
August 23, 1987, in a rural community just south of Little
Rock, police officers murdered two teenage boys because they witnessed a
police-protected drug drop. The drop was part of a drug smuggling operation
based at a small airport in Mena, Arkansas. The Mena operation was set up in
the early 1980?s by the notorious drug smuggler, Barry Seal.
Facing prison after a drug conviction in Florida, Seal flew
to Washington, D.C., where he put together a deal that allowed him to avoid
prison by becoming an informant for the government. As a government informant
against drug smugglers, Seal testified he worked for the CIA and the DEA. In
one federal court case, he testified that his income from March 1984 to August
1985, was between $700,000 and $800,000. This period was AFTER making his deal
with the government.
Seal testified that nearly $600,000 of this came from
smuggling drugs while working for — and with the permission of the DEA. In
addition to his duties as an informant, Seal was used by CIA operatives to help
finance the Nicaraguan Contras. The CIA connection to the Mena operation was
undeniable when a cargo plane given to Seal by the CIA was shot down over
Nicaragua with a load of weapons. In spite of the evidence, every investigator
who has tried to expose the crimes of Mena has been professionally destroyed,
and those involved in drug smuggling operations have received continued
protection from state and federal authorities.
------
Mena, Arkansas
A number of allegations have been written about and several
local, state, and federal investigations have taken place related to the notion
of the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport as a CIA drop point in
large scale cocaine trafficking beginning in the latter part of the 1980s. The
topic has received some press coverage that has included allegations of
awareness, participation and/or coverup involvement of figures such as future
presidents Bill Clinton,George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, as
well future Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Saline County prosecutor
Dan Harmon (who was convicted of numerous felonies including drug and
racketeering charges in 1997). The Mena airport was also associated with Adler
Berriman (Barry) Seal, an American drug smuggler and aircraft pilot who
flew covert flights for the CIA and the Medellín Cartel.
A criminal investigator from the Arkansas State
Police, Russell Welch, who was assigned to investigate Mena airport
claimed that he opened a letter which released electrostatically
charged Anthrax spores in his face, and that he had his life saved
after a prompt diagnosis by a doctor.[who?] He also claimed that later,
his doctor's office was vandalized, robbed, and test results and correspondence
with the CDC in Atlanta were stolen.
An investigation by the CIA's inspector general concluded
that the CIA had no involvement in or knowledge of any illegal activities that
may have occurred in Mena. The report said that the agency had conducted a
training exercise at the airport in partnership with another Federal agency and
that companies located at the airport had performed "routine
aviation-related services on equipment owned by the CIA".
--
"If the people were to ever find out what we have done,
we would be chased down the streets and lynched."
-- George Bush, cited in the June, 1992 Sarah McClendon
Newsletter
George Bush with legendary CIA agent Felix Rodriguez a.k.a.
"Mr. Gomez" who ran the Mexican portion of the Iran-Contra guns and
drug running operation.
"I have put thousands of Americans away for tens of
thousands of years for less evidence for conspiracy with less evidence than is
available against Ollie North and CIA people. . . . I personally was involved
in a deep-cover case that went to the top of the drug world in three countries.
The CIA killed it."
Former DEA Agent Michael Levine CNBC-TV, October 8, 1996
"The connections piled up quickly. Contra planes flew
north to the U.S., loaded with cocaine, then returned laden with cash. All
under the protective umbrella of the United States Government. My informants
were perfectly placed: one worked with the Contra pilots at their base, while
another moved easily among the Salvadoran military officials who protected the
resupply operation. They fed me the names of Contra pilots. Again and again,
those names showed up in the DEA database as documented drug traffickers.
"When I pursued the case, my superiors quietly and
firmly advised me to move on to other investigations."
Former DEA Agent Celerino Castillo Powder Burns, 1992
"The Subcommittee found that the Contra drug links
included:
Involvement in narcotics trafficking by individuals
associated with the Contra movement.
Participation of narcotics traffickers in Contra supply
operations through business relationships with Contra organizations.
Provision of assistance to the Contras by narcotics
traffickers, including cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and other
materials, on a voluntary basis by the traffickers.
Payments to drug traffickers by the US State Department of
funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in
some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement
agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active
investigation by these same agencies."
Senate Committee Report on Drugs,Law Enforcement and Foreign
Policychaired by Senator John F. Kerry
"I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000
kilos came in, funded by US taxpayer money."
DEA official Anabelle Grimm, during a 1993 interview on a
CBS-TV "60 Minutes" segment entitled "The CIA's Cocaine."
The 1991 CIA drug-smuggling event Ms. Grimm described was later found to be
much larger. A Florida grand jury and the Wall Street Journal reported
it to involve as much as 22 tons.
The Suppressed Article
This is the article which had been scheduled to appear in
the Washington Post. After having cleared the legal department for all possible
questions of inaccurate statements, the article was scheduled for publication
when just as the presses were set to roll, Washington Post Managing Editor Bob
Kaiser (Like George Bush, a member of the infamous "Skull & Bones
Fraternity), killed the article without explanation. According to the sidebar
which appeared with the Penthouse Magazine version of this story, Bob Kaiser
refused to even meet with Sally Denton and Roger Morris, hiding in his office
while his secretary made excuses.
This is the story that couldn't be suppressed. An
investigative report into a scandal that haunts the reputations of three
presidents - Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
THE CRIMES OF MENA
By Sally Denton and Roger Morris
Barry Seal - gunrunner, drug trafficker, and covert C.I.A.
operative extraordinaire - is hardly a familiar name in American politics. But
nine years after he was murdered in a hail of bullets by Medellin cartel hit
men outside a Salvation Army shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he has come back
to haunt the reputations of three American presidents.
Seal's legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered
documents that now verify and quantify much of what previously had been only
suspicion, conjecture, and legend. The documents confirm that from 1981 to his
brutal death in 1986, Barry Seal carried on one of the most lucrative,
extensive, and brazen operations in the history of the international drug
trade, and that he did it with the evident complicity, if not collusion, of
elements of the United States government, apparently with the acquiescence of
Ronald Reagan's administration, impunity from any subsequent exposure by George
Bush's administration, and under the usually acute political nose of then
Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
The newly unearthed papers show the real Seal as far more
impressive and well-connected than the character played by Dennis Hopper in a
made-for-TV movie some years ago, loosely based on the smuggler's life. The
film portrayed the pudgy pilot as a hapless victim, caught in a cross fire
between bungling but benign government agencies and Latin drug lords. The truth
sprinkled through the documents is a richer - and altogether more sinister -
matter of national and individual corruption. It is a tale of massive, socially
devastating crime, of what seems to have been an official cover-up to match,
and, not least, of the strange reluctance of so-called mainstream American
journalism to come to grips with the phenomenon and its ominous implications -
even when the documentary evidence had appeared.
The trail winds back to another slightly bruited but obscure
name - a small place in western Arkansas called Mena.
Of the many stories emerging from the Arkansas of the 1980s
that was crucible to the Clinton presidency, none has been more elusive than
the charges surrounding Mena. Nestled in the dense pine and hardwood forests of
the Ouachita Mountains, some 160 miles west of Little Rock, once thought a
refuge for nineteenth-century border outlaws and even a hotbed of
Depression-era anarchists, the tiny town has been the locale for persistent
reports of drug smuggling, gunrunning, and money laundering tracing to the early
eighties, when Seal based his aircraft at Mena's Intermountain Regional
Airport.
From first accounts circulating locally in Arkansas, the
story surfaced nationally as early as 1989 in a *Penthouse* article called
"Snowbound," written by the investigative reporter John Cummings, and
in a Jack Anderson column, but was never advanced at the time by other media.
Few reporters covering Clinton in the 1992 campaign missed hearing at least
something about Mena. But it was obviously a serious and demanding subject -
the specter of vast drug smuggling with C.I.A. involvement - and none of the
major media pursued it seriously During 1992, the story was kept alive by Sarah
McClendon, *The Nation*, and *The Village Voice*.
Then, after Clinton became president, Mena began to
reappear. Over the past year, CBS News and *The Wall Street Journal* have
reported the original, un-quieted charges surrounding Mena, including the
shadow of some C.l.A. (or "national security") involvement in the gun
and drug traffic, and the apparent failure of then governor Clinton to pursue
evidence of such international crime so close to home.
"Seal was smuggling drugs and kept his planes at
Mena," *The Wall Street Journal* reported in 1994. "He also acted as
an agent for the D.E.A. In one of these missions, he flew the plane that
produced photographs of Sandinistas loading drugs in Nicaragua. He was killed
by a drug gang [Medellin cartel hit men] in Baton Rouge. The cargo plane he
flew was the same one later flown by Eugene Hasenfus when he was shot down over
Nicaragua with a load of contra supplies.
In a mix of wild rumor and random fact, Mena has also been a
topic of ubiquitous anti-Clinton diatribes circulated by right-wing extremists
- an irony in that the Mena operation was the apparent brainchild of the two
previous and Republican administrations.
Still, most of the larger American media have continued
to ignore, if not ridicule, the Mena accusations. Finding no conspiracy in the
Ouachita's last July, a *Washington Post* reporter typically scoffed at the
"alleged dark deeds," contrasting Mena with an image as "Clan
destination, Arkansas ... Cloak and Dagger Capital of America." Noting that
*The New York Times* had "mentioned Mena primarily as the headquarters of
the American Rock Garden Society," the *Columbia Journalism Review* in a
recent issue dismissed "the conspiracy theories" as of "dubious
relevance."
A former Little Rock businessman, Terry Reed, has coauthored
with John Cummings a highly controversial book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and
the C.I.A., which describes a number of covert activities around Mena,
including a C.I.A. operation to train pilots and troops for the Nicaraguan
Contras, and the collusion of local officials. Both the book and its authors
were greeted with derision.
Now, however, a new mass of documentary evidence has come to
light regarding just such "dark deeds" - previously private and
secret records that substantiate as never before some of the worst and most
portentous suspicions about what went on at Mena, Arkansas, a decade ago.
Given the scope and implications of the Mena story, it may
be easy to understand the media's initial skepticism and reluctance. But it was
never so easy to dismiss the testimony arid suspicions of some of those close
to the matter: Internal Revenue Service Agent Bill Duncan, Arkansas State
Police investigator Russell Welch, Arkansas Attorney General J. Winston Bryant,
Congressman Bill Alexander, and various other local law-enforcement officials
and citizens.
All of these people were convinced by the late eighties that
there existed what Bryant termed "credible evidence" of the most
serious criminal activity involving Mena between 1981 and 1986. They also
believed that the crimes were committed with the acquiescence, if not the
complicity, of elements of the U.S. government. But they couldn't seem to get
the national media to pay attention.
During the 1992 campaign, outside advisers and aides urged
former California governor Jerry Brown to raise the Mena issue against Clinton
- at least to ask why the Arkansas governor had not done more about such
serious international crime so close to home. But Brown, too, backed away from
the subject. I'll raise it if the major media break it first," he told
aides. "The media will do it, Governor," one of them replied in
frustration, "if only you'll raise it."
Mena's obscure airport was thought by the I.R.S., the
F.B.I., U.S. Customs, and the Arkansas State Police to be a base for Adler
Berriman "Barry" Seal, a self-confessed, convicted smuggler whose
operations had been linked to the intelligence community. Duncan and Welch both
spent years building cases against Seal and others for drug smuggling and money
laundering around Mena, only to see their own law-enforcement careers damaged
in the process.
What evidence they gathered, they have said in testimony and
other public statements, was not sufficiently pursued by the then U.S. attorney
for the region, J. Michael Fitzhugh, or by the I.R.S., Arkansas State Police,
and other agencies. Duncan, testifying before the joint investigation by the
Arkansas state attorney general's office and the United States Congress in June
1991, said that 29 federal indictments drafted in a Mena-based money-laundering
scheme had gone unexplored. Fitzhugh, responding at the time to Duncan's
charges, said, "This office has not slowed up any investigation ... [and]
has never been under any pressure in any investigation."
By 1992, to Duncan's and Welch's mounting dismay, several
other official inquiries into the alleged Mena connection were similarly
ineffectual or were stifled altogether, furthering their suspicions of
government collusion and cover-up. In his testimony before Congress, Duncan
said the I.R.S. "withdrew support for the operations" and further
directed him to "withhold information from Congress and perjure
myself."
Duncan later testified that he had never before experienced
"anything remotely akin to this type of interference.... Alarms were going
off," he continued, "and as soon as Mr. Fitzhugh got involved, he was
more aggressive in not allowing the subpoenas and in interfering in the
investigative process."
State policeman Russell Welch felt he was "probably the
most knowledgeable person" regarding the activities at Mena, yet he was
not initially subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury. Welch testified
later that the only reason he was ultimately subpoenaed at all was because one
of the grand jurors was from Mena and "told the others that if they wanted
to know something about the Mena airport, they ought to ask that guy [Welch]
out there in the hall."
State Attorney General Bryant, in a 1991 letter to the
office of Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel in the Iran-Contra
investigation, wondered "why no one was prosecuted in Arkansas despite a
mountain of evidence that Seal was using Arkansas as his principle staging area
during the years 1982 through 1985."
What actually went on in the woods of western Arkansas? The
question is still relevant for what it may reveal about certain government
operations during the time that Reagan and Bush were in the White House and
Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
In a mass of startling new documentation - the more than
2,000 papers gathered by the authors from private and law-enforcement sources
in a year-long nationwide search - answers are found and serious questions are
posed.
These newly unearthed documents - the veritable private
papers of Barry Seal - substantiate at least part of what went on at Mena.
What might be called the Seal archive dates back to 1981,
when Seal began his operations at the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena.
The archive, all of it now in our possession, continues beyond February 1986,
when Seal was murdered by Colombian assassins after he had testified in federal
court in Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami for the U.S. government against
leaders of the Medellin drug cartel.
The papers include such seemingly innocuous material as
Seal's bank and telephone records; negotiable instruments, promissory notes,
and invoices; personal correspondence address and appointment books; bills of
sale for aircraft and boats; aircraft registration, and modification work
orders.
In addition, the archive also contains personal diaries;
handwritten to-do lists and other private notes; secretly tape-recorded
conversations; and cryptographic keys and legends for codes used in the Seal
operation.
Finally, there are extensive official records: federal
investigative and surveillance reports, accounting assessments by the I.R.S.
and the D.E.A., and court proceedings not previously reported in the press -
testimony as well as confidential pre-sentencing memoranda in federal
narcotics-trafficking trials in Florida and Nevada - numerous depositions, and
other sworn statements.
The archive paints a vivid portrait not only of a major
criminal conspiracy around Mena, but also of the unmistakable shadow of government
complicity. Among the new revelations:
Mena, from 1981 to 1985, was indeed one of the centers for
international smuggling traffic.
According to official I.R.S. and D.E.A. calculations, sworn
court testimony, and other corroborative records, the traffic amounted to
thousands of kilos of cocaine and heroin and literally hundreds of millions of
dollars in drug profits. According to a 1986 letter from the Louisiana attorney
general to then U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese, Seal "smuggled between
$3 billion and $5 billion of drugs into the U.S."
Seal himself spent considerable sums to land, base,
maintain, and specially equip or refit his aircraft for smuggling. According to
personal and business records, he had extensive associations at Mena and in
Little Rock, and was in nearly constant telephone contact with Mena when he was
not there himself. Phone records indicate Seal made repeated calls to Mena the
day before his murder. This was long after Seal, according to his own
testimony, was working as an $800,000-a-year informant for the federal
government.
A former member of the Army Special Forces, Seal had ties to
the Central Intelligence Agency dating to the early 1970s. He had confided to
relatives and others, according to their sworn statements, that he was a C.I.A.
operative before and during the period when he established his operations at
Mena. In one statement to Louisiana State Police, a Seal relative said,
"Barry was into gunrunning and drug smuggling in Central and South America
... and he had done some time in El Salvadore [sic]." Another then added,
"lt was true, but at the time Barry was working for the C.I.A."
In a posthumous jeopardy-assessment case against Seal - also
documented in the archive - the I.R.S. determined that money earned by Seal
between 1984 and 1986 was not illegal because of his "C.I.A.-D.E.A.
employment." The only public official acknowledgment of Seal's
relationship to the C.I.A. has been in court and congressional testimony, and
in various published accounts describing the C.I.A.'s installation of cameras
in Seal's C-123K transport plane, used in a highly celebrated 1984 sting
operation against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
Robert Joura, the assistant special agent in charge of the
D.E.A.'s Houston office and the agent who coordinated Seal's undercover work,
told *The Washington Post* last year that Seal was enlisted by the C.I.A. for
one sensitive mission - providing photographic evidence that the Sandinistas
were letting cocaine from Colombia move through Nicaragua. A spokesman for then
Senate candidate Oliver North told *The Post* that North had been kept aware of
Seal's work through "intelligence sources."
Federal Aviation Administration registration records
contained in the archive confirm that aircraft identified by federal and state
narcotics agents as in the Seal smuggling operation were previously owned by
Air America, Inc., widely reported to have been a C.I.A. proprietary company.
Emile Camp, one of Seal's pilots and a witness to some of his most significant
dealings, was killed on a mountainside near Mena in 1985 in the unexplained
crash of one of those planes that had once belonged to Air America.
According to still other Seal records, at least some of the
aircraft in his smuggling fleet, which included a Lear jet, helicopters, and
former U.S. military transports, were also outfitted with avionics and other
equipment by yet another company in turn linked to Air America.
Among the aircraft flown in and out of Mena was Seal's
C-123K cargo plane, christened Fat Lady. The records show that Fat Lady, serial
number 54-0679, was sold by Seal months before his death. According to other
files, the plane soon found its way to a phantom company of what became known
in the Iran-Contra scandal as "the Enterprise," the C.I.A.-related
secret entity managed by Oliver North and others to smuggle illegal weapons to
the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. According to former D.E.A. agent Celerino
Castillo and others, the aircraft was allegedly involved in a return traffic in
cocaine, profits from which were then used to finance more clandestine
gunrunning.
F.A.A. records show that in October 1986, the same Fat Lady
was shot down over Nicaragua with a load of arms destined for the Contras.
Documents found on board the aircraft and seized by the Sandinistas included
logs linking the plane with Area 51 - the nation's top-secret nuclear-weapons
facility at the Nevada Test Site. The doomed aircraft was co-piloted by Wallace
Blaine "Buzz" Sawyer, a native of western Arkansas, who died in the
crash. The admissions of the surviving crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, began a
public unraveling of the Iran-Contra episode.
An Arkansas gun manufacturer testified in 1993 in federal
court in Fayetteville that the C.I.A. contracted with him to build 250
automatic pistols for the Mena operation. William Holmes testified that he had
been introduced to Seal in Mena by a C.I.A. operative, and that he then sold
weapons to Seal. Even though he was given a Department of Defense purchase
order for guns fitted with silencers, Holmes testified that he was never paid
the $140,000 the government owed him. "After the Hasenfus plane was shot
down," Holmes said, "you couldn't find a soul around Mena."
Meanwhile, there was still more evidence that Seal's massive
smuggling operation based in Arkansas had been part of a C.I.A. operation, and
that the crimes were continuing well after Seal's murder.
In 1991 sworn testimony to both Congressman Alexander and
Attorney General Bryant, state police investigator Welch recorded that in 1987
he had documented "new activity at the [Mena] airport with the appearance
of ... an Australian business [a company linked with the C.I.A.], and C-130s
had appeared...."
At the same time, according to Welch, two F.B.I.
agents officially informed him that the C.I.A. "had
something going on at the Mena Airport involving Southern Air Transport
[another company linked with the C.I.A.] ... and they didn't want us [the
Arkansas State Police] to screw it up like we had the last one."
The hundreds of millions in profits generated by the Seal
trafficking via Mena and other outposts resulted in extraordinary banking and
business practices in apparent efforts to launder or disperse the vast amounts
of illicit money in Arkansas and elsewhere. Seal's financial records show from
the early eighties, for example, instances of daily deposits of $50,000 or
more, and extensive use of an offshore foreign bank in the Caribbean, as well
as financial institutions in Arkansas and Florida.
According to I.R.S. criminal investigator Duncan,
secretaries at the Mena Airport told him that when Seal flew into Mena, there
would be stacks of cash to be taken to the bank and laundered." One
secretary told him that she was ordered to obtain numerous cashier's checks,
each in an amount just under $10,000, at various banks in Mena and surrounding
communities, to avoid filing the federal Currency Transaction Reports required
for all bank transactions that exceed that limit.
Bank tellers testified before a federal grand jury that in
November 1982, a Mena airport employee carried a suitcase containing more than
$70,000 into a bank. "The bank officer went down the teller lines handing
out the stacks of $1,000 bills and got the cashier's checks."
Law-enforcement sources confirmed that hundreds of thousands
of dollars were laundered from 1981 to 1983 just in a few small banks near
Mena, and that millions more from Seal's operation were laundered elsewhere in
Arkansas and the nation.
Spanish-language documents in Seal's possession at the time
of his murder also indicate that he had accounts throughout Central America and
was planning to set up his own bank in the Caribbean.
Additionally, Seal's files suggest a grandiose scheme for
building an empire. Papers in his office at the time of his death include
references to dozens of companies, all of which had names that began with
Royale. Among them: Royale Sports, Royale Television Network, Royale Liquors,
Royale Casino, S.A., Royale Pharmaceuticals, Royale Arabians, Royale Seafood,
Royale Security, Royale Resorts ... and on and on.
Seal was scarcely alone in his extensive smuggling operation
based in Mena from 1981 to 1986, commonly described in both federal and state
law-enforcement files as one of the largest drug-trafficking operations in the
United States at the time, if not in the history of the drug trade. Documents
show Seal confiding on one occasion that he was "only the transport,"
pointing to an extensive network of narcotics distribution and finance in
Arkansas and other states. After drugs were smuggled across the border, the
duffel bags of cocaine would be retrieved by helicopters and dropped onto
flatbed trucks destined for various American cities.
In recognition of Seal's significance in the drug trade,
government prosecutors made him their chief witness in various cases, including
a 1985 Miami trial in absentia of Medellln drug lords; in another 1985 trial of
what federal officials regarded as the largest narcotics-trafficking case to date
in Las Vegas; and in still a third prosecution of corrupt officials in the
Turks and Caicos Islands. At the same time, court records and other documents
reveal a studied indifference by government prosecutors to Seal's earlier and
ongoing operations at Mena.
In the end, the Seal documents are vindication for dedicated
officials in Arkansas like agents Duncan and Welch and local citizens' groups
like the Arkansas Committee, whose own evidence and charges take on new gravity
- and also for *The Nation*, *The Village Voice*, the Association of National
Security Alumni, the venerable Washington journalists Sarah McClendon and Jack
Anderson, Arkansas. reporters Rodney Bowers and Mara Leveritt, and others who
kept an all-too-authentic story alive amid wider indifference.
But now the larger implications of the newly exposed
evidence seem as disturbing as the criminal enormity it silhouettes. Like his
modern freebooter's life, Seal's documents leave the political and legal
landscape littered with stark questions.
What, for example, happened to some nine different official
investigations into Mena after 1987, from allegedly compromised federal grand
juries to congressional inquiries suppressed by the National Security Council
in 1988 under Ronald Reagan to still later Justice Department inaction under
George Bush?
Officials repeatedly invoked national security to quash most
of the investigations. Court documents do show clearly that the C.I.A. and the
D.E.A. employed Seal during 1984 and 1985 for the Reagan administration's
celebrated sting attempt to implicate the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime in
cocaine trafficking.
According to a December 1988 Senate Foreign Relations
Committee report, "cases were dropped. The apparent reason was that the
prosecution might have revealed national-security information, even though all
of the crimes which were the focus of the investigation occurred before Seal
became a federal informant."
Tax records show that, having assessed Seal posthumously for
some $86 million in back taxes on his earnings from Mena and elsewhere between
1981 and 1983, even the I.R.S. forgave the taxes on hundreds of millions in
known drug and gun profits over the ensuing two-year period when Seal was
officially admitted to be employed by the government.
To follow the l.R.S. Iogic, what of the years, crimes, and
profits at Mena in the early eighties, before Barry Seal became an acknowledged
federal operative, as well as the subsequently reported drug-trafficking
activities at Mena even after his murder - crimes far removed from his admitted
cooperation as government informant and witness?
"Joe [name deleted] works for Seal and cannot be
touched because Seal works for the C.I.A.," a Customs official said in an
Arkansas investigation into drug trafficking during the early eighties. "A
C.I.A. or D.E.A. operation is taking place at the Mena airport," an F.B.I.
telex advised the Arkansas State Police in August 1987, 18 months after Seal's
murder. Welch later testified that a Customs agent told him, "Look, we've
been told not to touch anything that has Barry Seal's name on it, just to let
it go."
*The London Sunday Telegraph* recently reported new
evidence, including a secret code number, that Seal was also working as an
operative of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the period of the
gunrunning and drug smuggling.
Perhaps most telling is what is so visibly missing from the
voluminous files. In thousands of pages reflecting a man of meticulous
organization and planning, Barry Seal seems to have felt singularly and utterly
secure - if not somehow invulnerable - at least in the ceaseless air transport
and delivery into the United States of tons of cocaine for more than five
years. In a 1986 letter to the D.E.A., the commander and deputy commander of
narcotics for the Louisiana State Police say that Seal "was being given
apparent free rein to import drugs in conjunction with D.E.A. investigations
with so little restraint and control on his actions as to allow him the
opportunity to import drugs for himself should he have been so disposed."
Seal's personal videotapes, in the authors' possession, show
one scene in which he used U.S. Army paratroop equipment, as well as military
like precision, in his drug-transporting operation. Then, in the middle of the
afternoon after a number of dry runs, one of his airplanes dropped a load of
several duffel bags attached to a parachute. Within seconds, the cargo sitting
on the remote grass landing strip was retrieved by Seal and loaded onto a
helicopter that had followed the low-flying aircraft. "This is the first
daylight cocaine drop in the history of the state of Louisiana," Seal
narrates on the tape. If the duffel bags seen in the smuggler's home movies
were filled with cocaine - as Seal himself states on tape - that single load
would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Perhaps the videos were not of an actual cocaine drop, but
merely the drug trafficker's training video for his smuggling organization, or
even a test maneuver. Regardless, the films show a remarkable, fearless
invincibility. Barry Seal was not expecting apprehension.
His most personal papers show him all but unconcerned about
the very flights and drops that would indeed have been protected or
"fixed," according to law-enforcement sources, by the collusion of
U.S. intelligence.
In an interview with agent Duncan, Seal brazenly
"admitted that he had been a drug smuggler."
If the Seal documents show anything, an attentive reader
might conclude, it is that ominous implication of some official sanction. Over
the entire episode looms the unmistakable shape of government collaboration in
vast drug trafficking and gunrunning, and in a decade-long cover-up of
criminality.
Government investigators apparently had no doubt about the
magnitude of those crimes. According to Customs sources, Seal's operations at
Mena and other bases were involved in the export of guns to Bolivia, Argentina,
Peru, and Brazil, as well as to the Contras, and the importation of cocaine
from Colombia to be sold in New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and other
cities, as well as in Arkansas itself.
Duncan and his colleagues knew that Seal's modus operandi
included dumping most of the drugs in other southern states, so that what
Arkansas agents witnessed in Mena was but a tiny fragment of an operation
staggering in its magnitude. Yet none of the putative inquiries seems to have
made a serious effort to gather even a fraction of the available Seal documents
now assembled and studied by the authors.
Finally, of course, there are somber questions about then
governor Clinton's own role vis-a-vis the crimes of Mena.
Clinton has acknowledged learning officially about Mena only
in April 1988, though a state police investigation had been in progress for
several years. As the state's chief executive, Clinton often claimed to be
fully abreast of such inquiries. In his one public statement on the matter as
governor, in September 1991 he spoke of that investigation finding
"linkages to the federal government," and "all kinds of
questions about whether he [Seal] had any links to the C.l.A.... and if that
backed into the Iran-Contra deal."
But then Clinton did not offer further support for any
inquiry, "despite the fact," as Bill Plante and Michael Singer of CBS
News have written, "that a Republican administration was apparently
sponsoring a Contra-aid operation in his state and protecting a smuggling ring
that flew tons of cocaine through Arkansas."
As recently as March 1995, Arkansas state trooper Larry
Patterson testified under oath, according to *The London Sunday Telegraph*,
that he and other officers "discussed repeatedly in Clinton's
presence" the "large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena
airport, large quantities of money, large quantities of guns," indicating
that Clinton may have known much more about Seal's activities than he has admitted.
Moreover, what of the hundreds of millions generated by
Seal's Mena contraband? The Seal records reveal his dealings with at least one
major Little Rock bank. How much drug money from him or his associates made its
way into criminal laundering in Arkansas's notoriously freewheeling financial
institutions and bond houses, some of which are reportedly under investigation
by the Whitewater special prosecutor for just such large, unaccountable
infusions of cash and unexplained transactions?
"The state offers an enticing climate for
traffickers," I.R.S. agents had concluded by the end of the eighties,
documenting a "major increase" in the amount of large cash and bank
transactions in Arkansas after 1985, despite a struggling local economy.
Meanwhile, prominent backers of Clinton's over the same
years - including bond broker and convicted drug dealer Dan Lasater and chicken
tycoon Don Tyson - have themselves been subjects of extensive investigative and
surveillance files by the D.E.A. or the F.B.I. similar to those relating to
Seal, including allegations of illegal drug activity that Tyson has recently
acknowledged publicly and denounced as "totally false." "This
may be the first president in history with such close buddies who have NADDIS
numbers," says one concerned law-enforcement official, referring to the
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Intelligence System numbers assigned those under
protracted investigation for possible drug crimes.
The Seal documents are still more proof that for Clinton,
the Arkansas of the eighties and the company he kept there will not soon
disappear as a political or even constitutional liability.
"I've always felt we never got the whole story
there," Clinton said in 1991.
Indeed. But as president of the United States, he need no
longer wonder - and neither should the nation. On the basis of the Seal
documents (copies of which are being given to the Whitewater special prosecutor
in any case), the president should ask immediately for a full report on the
matter from the C.I.A., the D.E.A., the F.B.I., the Justice Department, and
other relevant agencies of his own administration - including the long-buried
evidence gathered by I.R.S. agent Duncan and Arkansas state police investigator
Welch. President Clinton should also offer full executive-branch cooperation
with a reopened congressional inquiry, and expose the subject fully for what it
says of both the American past and future.
Seal saw himself as a patriot to the end. He had dictated
his own epitaph for his grave in Baton Rouge: "A rebel adventurer the
likes of whom in previous days made America great." In a sense his
documents may now render that claim less ironic than it seems.
The tons of drugs that Seal and his associates brought into
the country, officials agree, affected tens of thousands of lives at the least,
and exacted an incalculable toll on American society. And for the three
presidents, the enduring questions of political scandal are once again apt:
What did they know about Mena? When did they know it? Why didn't they do
anything to stop it?
The crimes of Mena were real. That much is now documented
beyond doubt. The only remaining issues are how far they extended, and who was
responsible.
From the July 1995 issue of *Penthouse*
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